Our Google+ Conundrum

I’m going to add another Saturday morning sketch to this site, and offer a caveat to you all: I’ve not bounced this idea off many folks, and the seed of it comes from a source who is unreservedly biased about all this. But I thought this worth airing out, so here you have it.

Given that Google+ results are dominating so many SERPs these days, Google is clearly leveraging its power in search to build up Google+. Unless a majority of people start turning SPYW (Search Plus Your World) off, or decide to search in a logged out way, Google has positioned Google+ as a sort of “mini Internet,” a place where you can find results for a large percentage of your queries.(My source is pretty direct about this: “Google has decided that beating Facebook is worth selling their soul.”)

But to my point. An example of samesaid is the search I did this morning for that Hitler video I posted. Here’s a screenshot of my results:

As you can see, the Universal search feature kicked in, and put News results at the top. I know that news results won’t get me straight to the video, I want the YouTube or Vimeo page, not a story about the video. So I look to the results below. The next four results are from Google+. Right below the fold is the actual YouTube video. I didn’t see it on first blush.

So I found that video by clicking on someone’s Google+ post about it (see how the first one is purple, and not blue? That’s the one I clicked on). Some dude I don’t know posted it to Google+, I clicked through to his post (gaining Google another pageview), then clicked through the video to YouTube. That’s lame. That’s not a Googley search experience.

But if that’s how the world of Google works now, that means it’s very important that you tend your Google+ pages, so that you rank well in Google search. Google has pretty much gamed its own search engine to insure Google+ will succeed.

Now, this presents us all a conundrum. If a large percentage of people are logged into Google and/or Google+ when they are searching for stuff, that means Google+ pages are going to rank well for those people. Hence, I really have no choice but to play Google’s game, and tend to my Google+ page, be I a brand, a person, a small business…. are you getting the picture here? If you decide to NOT play on Google+, you will, in essence, be devalued in Google search, at least for the percentage of people who are logged in whilst using Google.

I dunno. This strikes me as wrong. I’ve spent nearly ten years building this site, Searchblog, and it has tens of thousands of inbound links, six thousand posts, nearly 30,000 comments, etc., etc. But if you are logged into Google+ and search for me, you’re going to get my Google+ profile first.

Seems a bit off. Seems like Google is taking the first click away from me and directing it to a Google service.

Now, if I decide to protest this, and delete my Google+ account, I better pray no one else named John Battelle creates a Google+ account, or they will rank ahead of me. And while Battelle is a pretty unique name, there are actually quite a few of us out there. Imagine if my name was John Kelly? Or Joe Smith?

Yikes. Quite a conundrum.

Again, just sketching on a Saturday morning. It’s a beautiful day, so I think I’ll stop, take a ride, and think a bit more about it before I write anymore.

I stopped using all google services, they are just starting to really creep me out. I feel like I’m being stalked as I use the net nowadays. It’s like a war between google and facebook to see who can gather more on it’s users for personal gain.
They forgot about us, the regular people, so I quit using google+ and facebook and now use a search engine called DuckDuckGo and am telling everyone about a newer site called AutumnsList (social site) as an alternative to google+ and facebook. In the process of getting my family to join, so i can chat with them without all the b.s. involved.
I just want some services to use without all the b.s. and these 2 are looking really good in my opinion. do a search for each name mentioned and you can read more about them.